Quantitative Datasets

Workshop data

This dataset combines data on “generalised/social trust” from the latest waves of the World Values Survey and the European Values Study with macro(country)-level data on World Development Indicators (WDI) provided by the World Bank. The main variables of interest taken from the WDI refer to measurements of economic inequality within countries. The dataset allows to replicate - using the latest available data - the analysis of the relationship between inequality and trust presented in Chapter 4 (“Community life and social relations”, pp. 49-62) of Wilkinson and Pickett (2010).

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This dataset is the one used by Österman (2021) for the analysis underpinning the results reported in his Table 3 and related tables in the Online Supplementary Material. The aim of the article is to use information on educational reforms across European countries as a way to set up a quasi-experimental design testing the effect of education on social trust. With this approach, it aims to overcome the limitations of cross-sectional observational survey data from the European Social Survey by attempting a causal - rather than just correlational- explanation.

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This dataset contains data from the EUROMODULE (1999-2002) surveys conducted in nine countries: Germany (DE) | Austria (AT) | Switzerland (CH) | Sweden (SE) | Spain (ES) | Slovenia (SI) | Korea, Republic of (KR) | Turkey (TR) | Hungary (HU). Out of the total of 366 variables measured, only those 100 were kept in this dataset that were used by Delhey and Newton (2003) in their analysis of the various correlates of “social trust”. The value of the EUROMODULE survey data compared to other comparative surveys that measure social trust is that it offers a much greater variety of explanatory variables that allow Delhey and Newton (2003) to test the relative explanatory power of several complex social theories explaining differences in levels of social trust both at the individual level and at the macro-social level.

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Assignment data

You will use one of the datasets available below for your assignment task. These are real-life data from large-scale nationally representative surveys that include variables relating to the research questions posted on Canvas. To make the data more manageable (and because the module cannot cover some very important but more advanced topics such as clustering standard errors and multi-level modelling of cross-country data, or applying survey weights) the datasets are broken down by country and contain only a small selection of the variables available from the original surveys.

The World Values Survey (WVS) is an international research program devoted to the scientific and academic study of social, political, economic, religious and cultural values of people in the world. The project grew out of the European Values Study and was started in 1981. Since then it has been operating in more than 120 world societies. The main research instrument of the project is a representative comparative social survey which is conducted globally every 5 years. The datasets below come from Wave 7 (2017-2022) data, which comprised 66 countries/territories. The majority of surveys were completed in 2018-2020 with only about a dozen countries conducting their fieldwork since the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak in 2021-2022. The last included survey comes from India and was completed in July 2023.

You should cite the original data source in your assignments as:

Haerpfer, C., Inglehart, R., Moreno, A., Welzel, C., Kizilova, K., Diez-Medrano J., M. Lagos, P. Norris, E. Ponarin & B. Puranen (eds.) (2022). World Values Survey: Round Seven. Datafile Version 5.0. Madrid, Spain & Vienna, Austria: JD Systems Institute & WVSA Secretariat. doi:10.14281/18241.24

The European Values Study (EVS) is a large-scale, cross-national and longitudinal survey research program on how Europeans think about family, work, religion, politics, and society. Repeated every nine years in an increasing number of countries, the survey provides insights into the ideas, beliefs, preferences, attitudes, values, and opinions of citizens all over Europe. The latest (fifth) wave of the survey, EVS 2017, was conducted in 37 participating countries.

You should cite the original data source in your assignments as:

EVS (2022). European Values Study 2017: Integrated Dataset (EVS 2017). GESIS, Cologne. ZA7500 Data file Version 5.0.0, https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13897.

The European Social Survey (ESS) is an academically driven cross-national survey that has been conducted across Europe since 2001. Every two years, face-to-face interviews are conducted with newly selected, cross-sectional samples.The survey measures the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour patterns of diverse populations and has been administered in 40 countries to date. ESS data collection is based on an hour-long face-to-face interview. The tenth ESS round covers 31 countries.

You should cite the original data source in your assignments as:

European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure (ESS ERIC) (2023). ESS10 integrated file, edition 3.2 [Data set]. Sikt - Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. https://doi.org/10.21338/ess10e03_2

Use the search table below to quickly check what variables are available in which survey dataset. In the Search field you can search for any keyword; in the Show [ ] entries field you can select to display more/all variables:

References

Delhey J and Newton K (2003) Who trusts?: The origins of social trust in seven societies. European Societies 5(2). Routledge: 93–137.
Österman M (2021) Can we trust education for fostering trust? Quasi-experimental evidence on the effect of education and tracking on social trust. Social Indicators Research 154(1): 211–233.
Wilkinson RG and Pickett K (2010) The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. New York: Bloomsbury Press.